It won't be until autonomous driving starts to drastically reduce the population that owns cars before you see significant decline in road use.

Autonomous vehicles that aren't owned by individual drivers (or rather, passengers) would increase road use. With the current situation, a driver drives from origin to destination and the car stays at the destination until the driver returns. With automation, the vehicle drives from origin to destination and then continues to the next trip origin. Unless, for every trip from point A to B, there's always somebody already at point B that wants to go to point C (as opposed to somebody at point C that wants to go to point D), the autonomous, no-passengers drive from B to C will be a net increase in road use.

What autonomous driving will really reduce is the need for parking.

The article talks about how "per-capita driving has peaked," but that's not the whole issue. It makes sense to stop building roads when the total amount of driving has peaked. For that to happen, one of several scenarios needs to occur:

• Per-capita driving peaks and population peaks too
• Per-capita driving continues to increase but population declines enough to offset it (maybe the situation in the rust belt?)
• Population continues to increase, but per-capita driving decreases fast enough to offset it.

The real reason Aaron Schwartz and the Pirate Bay had the book thrown at them is that their "crimes" were political speech and the Powers That Be wanted to make an example of them. The CFAA was merely a convenient tool to enable it.

In contrast, this guy was merely motivated by monetary gain, which the Powers That Be either (a) don't really give a shit about, since his victims were other "little people" or (b) tacitly admire him for, so obviously they're not particularly motivated to punish him.

Yeah, it'll make junk from Wal-Mart suddenly expensive. I can't say I'm upset about that.

Isn't Jurassic actually the period BEFORE dinosaurs ruled the earth, and therefore the movie should've been called "Cretaceous Park"?

No. Dinosaurs ruled during the Cretaceous and the Jurassic (and the Triassic, depending on your definitions), and some of the famous dinosaurs (e.g. Stegosaurus) were extinct by the beginning of the Cretaceous.

No, we're Americans, but that fact was established by the Treaty of Paris instead.

Exactly, which is why GMOs, like antibiotics, should be used very judiciously, not strewn about all over the place!

That depends on what the "new economic opportunities in an area for certain kinds of people" actually are. If we're talking about gentrification in Silicon Valley because of high programmer salaries then that's probably OK. If we're talking about gentrification in South Africa because of apartheid then that's not OK. Gentrification in historically-black neighborhoods in US cities is somewhere between, and the degree to which it's OK depends on how much of the difference in affluence can be attributed to the lingering effects of segregation.

Every instance of NSA surveillance that affects even a single person within the borders of the United States is illegitimate and illegal (specifically, a violation of the Fourth Amendment).

California's rolling blackouts were caused by Enron manipulating the deregulated market, not lack of generation capacity.

1. 1. Offer sub-prime mortgages to people, enticing them to buy houses they can't afford them long term. Profit.
2. 2. Repackage the bad parts of the debt and sell it off to chumps (like the retirement plans of the mortgagees from step #1). Profit again.
3. 3. Foreclose on the mortgagees when they stop being able to pay. Profit a third time.
4. 4. Use the huge losses on paper (because the foreclosed houses are now worth less) to get a gigantic bailout from the government. Profit a fourth time.
5. 5. Incorporate an REIT and buy up almost all of those houses at below-market value. Profit a fifth time.
6. 6. Rent them back out (at inflated "post-recovery" market rates) to the same poor chumps whose life savings you stole in steps #2 and #3. Profit a sixth time, and again and again, and then profit some more!

Unlike so many Slashdot business plans, this one requires no ellipses.

Screw the computer stuff; I'm excited to hear about this new technology that lets gigantic cargo ships sail to Wyoming!

They had a perfect opportunity to use a bottle inside a paper bag as their project logo, but no, they had to use a stupid yellow square instead!

Or would you claim that the video game industry is itself unacceptably narrow?

Yes, it is.

I certainly don't recommend going into that industry, but if you insist, you could try Atlanta. Georgia has a tax credit that's caused some companies to locate here. They're not making AAA games and they're startups that'll fail in a year or so, but at least you can get experience in a city with reasonable rent.

(I know this because my wife worked in that industry as an artist for several years, at a series of startups. She got laid off once a year, on average. When the tax credit expired the work dried up and she switched to graphic design. Even though the tax credit was renewed, she hasn't been able to find another gaming industry job.)

The point is that it's a problem when people who were born and raised in an area can't buy there

This can happen due to

1. land monopolists/collusioninsts, and

Of course, that point #1 is in fact what's happening. First the investor class made a bunch of money off mortgage-backed securities, then when the bubble burst they got bailed out by the government while normal people lost their homes to foreclosure, then they formed REITs and bought up all the devalued homes, and now they're making tons more money renting them back to their victims.